Photo by Jessica Antola
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My Jersey Journey
By Perry Garfinkel, September & October 2008
I was never proud of my Garden State roots. But after a soul-searching drive along the shore, I’ve got a new love for my old home
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It's hard on the psyche when your home state is a punch line. All my life I’ve heard jokes like:
Q: What do you call a smart guy in New Jersey?
A: Lost.
Bada-bing, bada-bang.
I was born in New York City, but when I was five my family moved to West Orange, New Jersey (Exit 145 on the Garden State Parkway). High-school all-state orchestra percussionist, state-university graduate, rookie journalist at the state’s top newspaper—I am as Jersey as the big red tomatoes for which we are famed. My mother, sister, and brother-in-law all still live there, but I moved away as soon as possible. When asked my state of origin, I’d say, “I’m from New Jersey—far from New Jersey.” I learned to speak in modulated tones and worked hard to pronounce my r’s and erase any other trace of my accent, a mix of New Yawk and New Joisey. And yet, for better and worse, I embody many of the traits associated with people from my state. We are a feisty lot, salt of the fertile earth that helped dub ours the Garden State. Perhaps we are a bit over-the-top and in-your-face, a compensation for the homegrown inferiority complex that comes from being sandwiched between big Philadelphia and bigger New York City. We are a place many know only as a corridor, between here and there, neither here nor there.
Our great common denominator is the Jersey Shore, though not even the waves and sand could seduce me into loving my home state. While beachgoers have combed the roughly 130 miles from Perth Amboy to Cape May for hundreds of years, I eschewed it. I’ve walked some of the planet’s great beaches while on assignment. How could Long Beach Island compare with the beaches of Goa, India, or Phi Phi Le Island in Thailand?
Then, last spring, my 88-year-old mother, Lillian, took a fall, and I offered to spend a couple of weeks with her while she recuperated. En route to New Jersey, staring at a map of the state at a pit stop on the New Jersey Turnpike, I realized there was a hole in my travel soul. So after hanging out with dear Lil for two weeks (she’s doing fine, thanks), I set out to fill that gap by traversing the entire shore from north to south. I threw my well-worn carryon bag and some beach gear into the back of my Subaru and did what I do best: I hit the open road for parts unknown, this time to rediscover my home.
Perth Amboy to Atlantic Highlands
Perth Amboy is an industrial harbor city of 50,000, and though it’s not the Jersey Shore of my youth, it’s the northern terminus of the self-guided New Jersey Coastal Heritage Trail tour, and thus the launching point for my drive “down the shore,” as we Jerseyans like to say.
I head south on Route 36 to Atlantic Highlands. One of my hopes on this journey is to discover the beauty of New Jersey, and it’s here, atop Mount Mitchill Scenic Overlook—at 266 feet, the highest natural elevation on the Atlantic coastline from Maine to the Yucatán—that I have my first aha moment. Scanning the panoramic horizon, I take in the whole of the great basin called Lower Bay: from Perth Amboy to Staten Island to the Manhattan skyline, Brooklyn, and Long Island to the east. Off to my right is the long, thin finger of sand called Sandy Hook National Park; above me flocks of birds migrate south.
From this distant perch, I can see how Jersey achieved its second-class status. When New York City became too crowded, the overflow spilled to what became New Jersey. We would become “that place across the Hudson.” An also-ran.
Rumson to Asbury Park
No one understood Jersey’s no-respect status better than Bruce Springsteen. Back in the ’70s, Bruce was a scruffy guy from Freehold who put his heart, soul, and sweat into marathon shows along the shore (“Rock ’n’ roll was the only thing I liked about myself,” he once said of those early years). The great regret of my life is that I missed seeing Springsteen before he became a superstar. So now, as admittedly small compensation, I drive down to Rumson, parking my car outside his gated estate, which sits across the street from a private school. The house is invisible, hidden by trees and a vast expanse of land. I cue up my personally burned “Best of the Boss” CD and listen for guidance in lyrics I have heard a thousand times before. Maybe Bruce is right: tramps like me are born to run.
I’m still blasting the CD when I arrive in Asbury Park. The title and artwork for Springsteen’s first album, 1973’s Greetings From Asbury Park, N.J., came from a vintage postcard he found at a boardwalk souvenir stand. Long before Springsteen turned the Stone Pony nightclub into headquarters for rock’s Jersey Shore sound, Asbury Park was an important stop for such marquee entertainers as Frank Sinatra and Count Basie as they whistle-stopped en route to Atlantic City, Philly, and points beyond. The amusement park and nearby Bradley Beach were my high-school posse’s stomping grounds. Heaven was a summer day on the wide beach, the Ferris wheel at Palace Amusements, and hot nights of smooching under (yes) the boardwalk.
Those glory days ended on July 4, 1970, when Asbury Park literally went up in smoke during race riots. The recovery has been slow. Where hotels used to line the beachfront, now there are only two. The Stone Pony is surrounded by vacant lots.
But Asbury Park is making a comeback. Federally funded beach-replenishment programs, up and down the Jersey coast, have widened the city’s sandy skirt back to 300 feet. The renaissance is most evident on Cookman Avenue, two blocks from City Hall, where new businesses, shops, and restaurants are sprouting up through the cracks in the cement. Marilyn Schlossbach, a spunky Neptune, New Jersey, native and co-owner of Market in the Middle, one of the new eateries, put it as well as the Boss could have: “Asbury Park is essential Jersey: we’re black, we’re white, we’re gay, we’re straight, we’re Latino, we’re old, and we’re young—we’re Everyman,” she says. “We may have been held back, but we won’t be held down.”
Long Beach Island to Atlantic City
My sister, Sue, and her husband, Shel, live in Manahawkin, just before the bridge to 18-mile-long, quarter-mile-wide Long Beach Island. I take them to dinner at Daddy O in Brant Beach, a restaurant connected to a boutique hotel. It forgoes the traditional faux lobster traps and barnacle-tangled netting for round, red-leather booths and lighting that looks like suspended snowflakes, a style it boasts as “hip and trendy,” not adjectives I associate with the Garden State. But the menu is an inventive mélange of various cultures, much like New Jersey itself, and I begin to think that perhaps the shore has some redeeming qualities.
About once a month Sue and Shel drive about 35 minutes south to Atlantic City. I go…never. Sorry, I choose to gamble with my lifestyle instead. That said, I love a sociocultural spectacle as much as the next guy. The marquee-chef restaurants, the dazzle of neon, the cling/clang/ka-ching of someone other than me losing money... Atlantic City is all that.
I arrive in town and rediscover my own vice: the world’s oldest (1870) and longest (5.75 miles) boardwalk, named not after its Brazilian hardwood and longleaf yellow southern pine boards, but after Alexander Boardman, a railroad conductor whose idea helped keep sand out of hotel lobbies. There is no feeling quite like the bouncy buoyancy of the Boardwalk under your feet. With the salt air filling my lungs, I am suspended in animated happiness.
I work up an appetite for some hard-core local eats and head to the “world famous” White House Sub Shop. It’s short on ambiance but huge on portions: my half “special” contains about 275 varieties of cold cuts (slight exaggeration) and is twice the size of most subs (no exaggeration). If this is quintessential Jersey cuisine, my digestive system reminds me why I moved away.
Enjoying myself despite myself, I am nonetheless glad the next day to trade Atlantic City’s artificial neon for the great neon-blue heron I glimpse at the 43,000-plus-acre Edwin Forsythe National Wildlife Refuge, ten miles north. The bird stands still in a stand of long, slender grass, the monolithic buildings of Atlantic City behind it. The best parts of Jersey may be overshadowed by development, but if you’re willing to look in corners, you’ll find what was here before Man: a garden state of possibilities. How did I miss all this growing up?
Cape May
The next day I’m at the Cape May Bird Observatory, a world-renowned mecca for bird watchers. Roughly 300 migrating species have been spotted here, and it’s a pretty good spot for humans, too. This southernmost point in Jersey, set hard against the Delaware Bay, circled on three sides by fields and meadows, is a pristine pocket of serenity compared with the northern part of the state.
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Cape May, which bills itself as the oldest seaside resort in America (dating back to 1812), is the end of the road, New Jerseywise. It’s also an island. You can’t get any farther away from the state and still be in it. If I were to settle in my home state, it would be here, among the year-round locals who define themselves by their separateness from the rest of New Jersey. Here it’s cool to be uncool; I’d fit right in.
Which fittingly brings me back to Springsteen. As Bruce said when inducted into the New Jersey Hall of Fame in May, our lack of cool is a blessing. It fills us, he said, with naked ambition—“the desire not just to do our best, but to stick it in your face.” As with most everything the Boss says, I agree. If not for the deep roots I planted here, I don’t know what I would have amounted to, but I know this: even for a tramp like me, it’s good to be home.
Perry Garfinkel last went in search of himself to write Buddha or Bust (Three Rivers Press, 2007).
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